Differences in Kind and Rhythm

The dialogue exhibition Differences in Kind and Rhythm, featuring Italian painter Giorgio Griffa and New Zealand sculptor Peter Robinson (Ngāi Tahu, 1966), is curated by James Gatt and organised by Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The exhibition is part of an ongoing series that pairs artists from Aotearoa and the international scene.

Spanning the years 1972 to 2025, the works on display—paintings on canvas by Griffa and sculptures by Robinson—unfold across time and across practices. Although from different generations and cultural contexts, the two artists share a systematic use of repeat forms and processes to explore notions of difference, variation, transformation, and continuity. Through gestures such as marking, stacking, and folding—each echoing broader reflection on time, matter, and identity—they construct modular or sequential compositions that serve as visual mappings of their own open-ended creative processes.

A carefully conceived installation generates vibrant and shifting relationships between Robinson’s sculptures and Griffa’s canvases, activating the shared exhibition spaces in a fluid and resonant interplay. Alongside this inquiry into process and form, the exhibition offers a field of cross-cutting references—from science to number, ancestral traditions to philosophy—drawing together two culturally and geographically distant perspectives: the Western and the Māori. What emerges is a profoundly generative encounter.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue (forthcoming July 26th), featuring new texts by Christina Barton, Jarrett Earnest, Justin Paton, and Shannon Te Ao, as well as an extended curatorial essay by James Gatt.
 

Excerpt from the curator’s introduction

Held across three rooms, Differences in Kind and Rhythm proceeds from simpler, sparer uses of lines by Griffa and Robinson to more complex, lyrical, and colourful networks in their paintings and sculptures and, finally, onto their most recent sequencings of numbers and spiral forms with overt reference points. The signs, shapes, and numbers we see in works by Griffa and Robinson draw on ranging subjects found in mathematics, nature, and philosophy, including the golden ratio and koru, binary code, cosmology and time, and the indeterminate space between something and nothing. The exhibition also operates along the slippery line between painting and sculpture, with only paintings from Griffa and only sculptures by Robinson, forming an installation in which two- and three- dimensional compositions interact, animating the shared space between them. Pinned to the wall with obvious creases, Griffa’s unstretched paintings feel sculptural, while, conversely, Robinson’s lineal sculptures read like drawings in space.

James Gatt